Books Read in 2022 - Part 1

I read. It’s what I do. And for the last decade and a half or so I’ve been keeping track of the things I’ve read because it interests me to do so.

Last year was the year that my brain broke for a while, though. It’s been a long few years after a long few years for all sorts of reasons, and I didn’t actually get to my fifth book of the year – a mark I usually reach in January – until April. Some years you just have to sit back and let things flow over you, I guess. But eventually I got back on track and by the end I was about where I was in 2021, which itself was down a bit from where I hope to be but still better than I thought I’d do.

It was a year of sequels and rereading the previous volumes so I’d know where the story left off. I spent a good chunk of the summer reading graphic novels, something I almost never do because I tend to look at the words and ignore the art and that’s kind of missing the point of such things. There were many good books, no really great ones, and at least one that was both well written and something of a chore to get through because of the story it told.

So here is the list for 2022. Enjoy!

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The Wisdom of Crowds: Book 3 of the Age of Madness (Joe Abercrombie)

Say one thing about revolutions, say that they will eat themselves in the end. In this concluding volume of the Age of Madness trilogy (the first two of which are on last year’s list) the wheels within wheels will spin wildly out of control, plots and subplots will boil to the surface and evaporate like the steam that drives the Union’s new industrial age, and in the end all one can do is stand with the winners and make use of the tools one has. This book picks up almost immediately after the end of The Trouble With Peace, with King Orso making his way back to Adua in the wake of the battle at Stoffenbeck. Expecting a hero’s welcome – or at least a bit of respite from his cares – instead he finds the Great Change has happened, as Abercrombie’s historical model shifts from a grim mixture of the English Civil War and the horrors of early 19th-century industrialization to a feverish blend of the French Revolution’s Terror and the Russian Revolution’s purges. The world has turned upside down in Adua and the lunatics have taken over, and through it all Orso and the others from across the Union and the North – Savine, Leo, Zuri, Hildi, Vick, Judge, Shivers, Rikke, Isern, Black Calder, Clover, and on – will seek to navigate the treacherous new world of the Great Change. And in the end, those who are left will find a new world, if not one that is appreciably better, a world where industrialization and politics may or may not have crowded out the dark magics of old. Abercrombie is one of the best writers in modern SF/F and this series lived up to his very high standards.

The Dawn of Everything (David Graeber and David Wengrow)

This is a monumental book in pretty much every sense of the term. Long (over 500 pages of text), exhaustively documented (84 pages of endnotes and 73 pages of bibliography), and wide-ranging (it takes as its subject matter all of human society from the earliest moment such a thing might be said to exist through to the present), it offers a thorough and detailed rebuttal to the general thinking on such things. Basically, Graeber and Wengrow went through the last thirty or forty years of anthropological, archeological, and historical studies and asked, “How does this change the standard narrative of human history and society?” and discovered that the answer was “An awful lot.” They start with the Indigenous Critique – the sharp, often unanswerable analysis of European thought and society that was offered by indigenous cultures wherever Europeans expanded into during their various ages of empires. Where did this come from? How influential was it? And they use this to address – or, at least they start with the idea that they will address – the question of the origins of inequality. But as they quickly reveal, this is the wrong question. In fact, once you take into account the scholarship of the last half century, it’s not a question that makes any sense at all. And from there they are off, examining the roads not taken in human society, or the roads that were taken and from which we seem to have veered off. They cover Mesoamerican societies, Fertile Crescent societies, societies all over the world and from the Neolithic to the present. Eventually they offer a definition of “freedom” that is rather at odds with modern Western views on the matter and show that Western views are but one possible outcome, not an inevitability. It’s a dense, readable synthesis and one that deserves to be widely influential for future scholars of many disciplines – history, anthropology, philosophy, legal studies, and the like. Graeber has since passed away, however, and the two sequels that he and Wengrow had planned may never see the light of day. This would be an enormous loss.

Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, & Observations (Craig Ferguson)

Craig Ferguson is no longer a late-night television host, but he will forever be one thing: a recovering alcoholic. This is a collection of pretty much exactly what the subtitle says it is – not nearly comprehensive enough to be a biography, but thorough enough to give you a sense of the struggles he’s had with substance abuse and the work he’s put into overcoming it. Along the way he describes his show, his comedy act, various people he’s met and what he’s thought of them, bits and pieces of his childhood, and his current wife, whom he as at great pains to defend against slanders I didn’t even know were happening, which I suppose says more about me than about Ferguson. Through it all he is an entertaining and humane companion, opinionated and often skirting the edge of what can be said politely, and the book is a lot of fun that way.

Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Bill Buford)

This was perhaps the perfect book to be reading while on a trip to Italy. Buford was a writer – indeed, an editor for The New Yorker – and living a comfortable life as such, except for a remarkable friendship with Mario Batali and a vague sense that he wanted to do more than just write. So he approached Batali and asked to be an unpaid worker in one of his restaurant kitchens – a “kitchen slave,” as he comes to think of himself. From there he slowly learns how not to be an impediment to everything going on around him, and eventually how to contribute to it. He works his way around the various stations of the kitchen, giving descriptions of what he is learning, who he is with (some of which can be rather cringy, as his descriptions are strongly gendered), and the general atmosphere of restaurant work. This is essentially a memoir in the vein of Anthony Bourdain, in other words. Eventually Buford decides he needs to learn where Batali learned and he goes to Italy, where he learns pasta making from the masters in a small dying Italian village, and then (as noted in the title) apprentices himself to a butcher in Tuscany – an exercise in culture as much as food preparation. Buford is an engaging writer, though one of the things that comes across fairly clearly despite (one suspects) his best intentions is just how much of a horrible person Mario Batali actually is. Yet he dedicates the book to Batali, in glowing terms.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (KJ Parker)

Orhan is an engineer – a colonel in the Imperial Army, in fact, despite being a milkface in the Robur Empire, a polity of blueskins who are never shy about pointing out the inferiority and general undesirability of milkfaces. But when an unseen and apparently well trained force destroys the Imperial Army, blocks the Fleet, and lays siege to the City (yes, there’s always a City in books like these) it is up to Orhan to save the day. And when the leader of the besieging forces turns up and requests an audience with him, things spiral out of control from there. Orhan is a charming rogue, utterly corrupt, resourceful, clever, and generally contemptuous of rules, procedures, and precedent – in other words, just the man for the job. He has to contend with a City divided between Blues and Greens in much the way that Justinian’s Byzantium had been and with equal violence, a catatonic Emperor, and a generally misfit group of supporters, agents, and conscripts to keep the City from being slaughtered to the last person. This is, it turns out, the first of a trilogy – something I didn’t know the first time I read it – and having now found volume three I thought it would be good to start from scratch and follow the story in real time. Orhan has a compelling voice – exasperated, sarcastic, knowing, and generally sounding like he’s letting you in on wisdom that in hindsight is more or less common sense filtered through bad experiences, and at times he’s excruciatingly funny in a deadpan sort of way – and KJ Parker’s skill with sentences comes shining through as well.

How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It (KJ Parker)

During the American Revolution the Continental Army was completely reformed by Baron von Steuben, who was a fraud. He wasn’t a baron. He was a Prussian drill sergeant, and sometimes a fraud that works is exactly what you need. This is the basic set up for this story. It has been seven years since the events of Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and Colonel Orhan has long been forgotten, mostly for political reasons as it would never do for a milkface to have saved the City so it must, therefore, have been Lysimachus – safely blueskinned, the very model of Robur heroism, and in one of those accidents of war that just happen from time to time squashed by a trebuchet stone at the very beginning of this story. The siege of the City has not been lifted since Orhan’s time, but things had settled down. Into this comes Notkur – an actor and impressionist, living at the margins of Robur society in the way actors have traditionally done in most societies, but whose skill at imitating Lysimachus means that powerful people end up tracking him down and making him an offer he can’t refuse, namely to become Lysimachus and run the City, or at least give that impression while they run the City. And since Lysimachus was having an affair with Hodda – a theater manager well known to Notkur and the most intelligent person Notkur has ever met – he ends up dragging her into this as his wife. Notkur, like Orhan, is another charming rogue with more on the ball than even he suspects, and he manages to keep the City running, defeat more than a few conspiracies, assaults, betrayals, and general episodes of mayhem, and in the end you can plausibly suggest that he saved the City, depending on how you define “saved” or “City.” Notkur has a similar voice to Orhan, and the story benefits from that immensely.

A Practical Guide to Conquering the World (KJ Parker)

With this concluding volume of his Charming Rogue Trilogy, Parker brings the story of the Robur to a conclusion if not particularly an ending. The narrator of this volume is Felix, a former Robur soldier mutilated by his peers and then sent off to the Echmen Empire to work as a translator. There he runs into She Stamps Them Flat, the queen (or soon to be) of the Hus, one of the many feuding desert tribes collectively known as the Dejauzi. Through a combination of misfortune and scheming Felix and the Hus are sent off into the world, first to gather the Dejauzi and conquer the Echmen, and then to take over the world. Along the way Felix discovers what happened to the Robur – including the disparate fates of Notkur and Hodda – and becomes a Prophet of his own religion. Parker sprinkles allusions throughout the book for those who can catch them, and in the end Felix’s plans turn out nothing like what he intended but somehow more or less fine, which for Parker is about the happiest of endings possible.

Hell’s Super (Mark Cain)

Steve Minion is damned to an eternity as the chief maintenance man in Hell. He’s not good at his job, but if he were he wouldn’t have it. He’s got an assistant (Orson Welles – yes, that one), a love interest (Florence Nightingale, who isn’t actually damned but came down to Hell to comfort the lost souls), and an eternal life of the sort of torment that comes when everything is pointless, run down, and deliberately aggravating. Hell, it turns out, is not fire and brimstone so much as sand in your shorts. But when the elevator between the Pearly Gates and Hell breaks down and his two hired hands (Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, who get along about as well as you think they would) can’t fix it, the whole thing turns into a spy caper that involves the devil himself, the Bat Out Of Hell (BOOH), Steven Pinkerton, and a conspiracy of rebels trying to break out of Hell. Mark Cain – which has to be a pseudonym – self-published this book and it shows, as it’s about a draft away from something a traditional publisher would support, but it’s an entertaining story for the most part.

Notes from the Burning Age (Claire North)

Ven belongs to the Temple, an order that arose in the centuries after the Burning Age – the age of combustion and technology and warfare that ended when the kakuy, the spirits of the world, restored the balance by wiping out most of human civilization and scattering its remnants. They did this not particularly out of any concern for humans one way or another but because the world simply needed to be balanced – the indifference of the gods to humans, their lack of interest in prayer or sacrifice or any other human activity, is a running theme in this book. Set among the successor states of what was once Eastern Europe, where some older technology remains (Ven has access to computers, known as inkstones, and there are batteries and electric vehicles), this is at one level a story of humanity’s urge to master the environment at any cost to itself or the world as a whole. At the human level, however, it is a brutal cat and mouse game between Ven and Georg, who plots to get rid of the kakuy and restore humanity to its pre-burning height. Georg sounds an awful lot like any modern right-wing ideologue today when he gets rolling on his ideas and plans, which is probably why the online reviews of this book are so full of climate deniers, authoritarians, and other assorted halfwits whining about their views being criticized and their delicate feelings being hurt. I can’t say this upset me. In practical terms Georg wants to restore the Burning Age by declaring war on the successor states (which makes sense in context), while Ven and the Temple want to stop him. This is written with North’s trademark complex characters, melancholy tone, interweaving plots, and general inability to bring a story to a neat end, and its often meditative style is more tonal than propulsive at times, but it is well written and engaging and if you like North’s other books – as I do – it is definitely worth the time spent reading it.

The Midwest Survival Guide (Charlie Berens)

Regional humor is an acquired taste, but I’ve lived in the midwest for more than a quarter of a century now so I thought I’d give this one a shot. Charlie Berens is the comedian behind The Manitowoc Minute and in that spirit this is a “couple-three hundred” pages of broad generalizations and humorous asides about the region, defined as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma – the last five of which I don’t particularly see as midwestern so much as Plains states, but so be it. He goes through the food, the language, the general tribal customs of midwesterners (and he does go out of his way to include indigenous and other non-white groups in his definition of midwestern) and so on, and if you’ve spent any time here you’ll recognize the grain of truth behind most of it. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.